An eye tracking study of the effect of target rank on web search

Web search engines present search results in a rank ordered list. This works when what a user wants is near the top, but sometimes the information that the user really wants is located at the bottom of the page. This study examined how users' search behaviors vary when target results were displayed at various positions for informational and navigational tasks. We found that when targets were placed relatively low in the first page of search results, people spent more time searching and were less successful in finding the target, especially for informational tasks. Further analysis of eye movements showed that the decrease in search performance was partially due to the fact that users rarely looked at lower ranking results. The large decrease in performance for informational search is probably because users have high confidence in the search engine's ranking; in contrast to navigational tasks, where the target is more obvious from information presented in the results, in info...